The Essay: 2019 - The Year of Blade Runner

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

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The Essay: Blade Runner at 40

The Essay: Blade Runner at 40: The Year of Blade Runner 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings

The Year of Blade Runner 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings

Blade Runner at 40

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Blade Runner at 40, The Year of Blade Runner 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings

Five writers explore Blade Runner's legacy. 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. Five writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film. 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by, Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations & extreme divides between rich and poor.

Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways. 
The writer Ken Hollings takes the Voight Kampff test as he examines the ethical barriers between us and the machine.
"According to both the novel and its film adaptation, androids are committing a crime simply by not being human. And in the world of 2019, Blade Runner reveals, the punishment is enforced ‘retirement’ – or legal execution. This is the extent to which humanity holds itself responsible for its creations. "

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The Essay explores the dystopian world of Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner.

Forty years ago, the future came into focus in Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner. All this week, The Essay explores the dystopian world of the film.

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The Year of Blade Runner 3: More Human Than Human - Ken Hollings

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